Why it Had to be Ryan—or Someone Like Him

As soon as it became reasonably clear on Friday night that Mitt Romney had chosen Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan as his running mate, Democrats started to act as though Romney had just given them Christmas in August. Or, at least, they started to pretend like they thought that way.

The Left says that running against Ryan and his budget—a “profoundly radical document,” as James Surowiecki said in his column in the magazine earlier this year, that would, according to some, be the death of Medicare as we know it—is a dream. They won’t have to defend the economy and President Obama’s handling of it, the thinking goes; they can just slam Ryan’s plan.

That may be the case. It’s certainly true that Ryan is a risky pick. That doesn’t mean he was a bad one, though.

According to a few reports Saturday morning, Romney actually made his choice more than a week ago, and kept it quiet until now. That may just be spin intended to show that Romney wasn’t bullied into the pick by the spate of conservative op-ed writers pleading for Ryan over the past couple days, but if it is true, a group of polls that came out in the past week make the presumptive Republican nominee’s decision look rather prescient.

If it looked like Romney could cruise to victory based on his charm and the moribund economy, then the smart move for him would have been to play it safe and stick with the “incredibly boring white guy” plan on which he had reportedly settled. But the latest round of polling shows that he needed to do something to shake up the race. He needed to gamble, like John McCain did in 2008, when he picked Sarah Palin as his running mate.

John Cassidy has already made an interesting case that these new polls—three of them, to be specific, all showing Obama up by seven percentage points or more—may just be the Olympics giving the incumbent a boost. But as he noted, a look inside the polls reveals something disturbing for the Romney camp.

Over the past month, more voters have started paying close attention to the election. At the same time, they’ve gotten a better look at Romney, without the distraction of the other Republican candidates. They don’t seem to like what they see. A CNN poll shows Romney’s unfavorable rating up six percentage points since the end of June, rising to forty-eight per cent, or one point higher than his forty-seven-per-cent favorable rating. Fox News’ numbers are even worse for Romney: according to the network’s survey, fifty-two per cent of respondents had a favorable opinion of him in mid-July. That number is now forty-six per cent. The percentage of respondents who say their opinion of Romney is unfavorable rose five points, going from forty to forty-five per cent.

These kinds of numbers aren’t fatal—or, at least, they certainly aren’t fatal yet. (Polls taken this far out from Election Day, honestly, aren’t of all that much value when it comes to predicting what voters will actually do when it comes time to pull a lever.) But they do show that the Obama campaign has been succeeding at making this election at least partially about Romney and not just about the economy. And they’re another piece in a growing body of evidence that suggests Romney needs to do more than just run against Obama and unemployment if he’s to win.

As Al Gore can remind you, the national popular vote isn’t actually what matters when it comes to electing a President—it’s all about the Electoral College. Even before these new polls, the map hadn’t looked good for Romney; after them, it may have started seeming like the stuff of nightmares.

Assume for a moment that Obama will win the East and West Coast states that Democrats have typically taken since 1992, plus a few other states that are fairly dependably blue: Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. And give him the three Mountain West states he won in 2008 thanks to the Latino vote: Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico. That’s two hundred and sixty-six Electoral College votes right there, four short of the magic number. Six states—Florida, Indiana, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia—are left. Romney would have to run the table in them to win; if Obama took any one of them, he’d be back in the White House.

That scenario is hardly a safe thing to assume with the economy the way that it is, but it’s not crazy, either, because Romney hasn’t been making many inroads into Democratic states. Given enough time, and some bad economic news, he might have been able to. But he couldn’t keep waiting and hoping. He had to take a risk; he had to pick Ryan, or someone like him. Maybe it won’t end with him taking the oath of office next year, but it’s his best shot.

For more on Romney, Ryan, and the rest of the campaign, bookmark The Political Scene, our hub for coverage of the 2012 election.

Above: Romney and Ryan appear at a campaign event in April. Photograph by Justin Sullivan/Getty

Alex Koppelman was a politics editor for newyorker.com from from 2011 to 2013.